College of Information and Computer Science, Long Island University
Published by September 14th, 2008
in libraries, Second Life, American Library Association and virtual worlds.
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Visitors to ALA Island in Second Life are encouraged to show their library card pride by taking a snapshot of their avatar holding an “@ your library” library card. Snapshots can be posted on the Constellation of Library Stars gallery. Virtual library cards are available at the ALA Main Stage,
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Published by July 19th, 2008
in Second Life, virtual worlds and internet.
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Virtual worlds can seem walled off from the rest of the Internet. Many, including Linden Lab’s popular virtual world Second Life, can’t be accessed through ordinary Web browsers: they require separately downloaded software. A Web link embedded in Second Life will open an outside browser window, pulling a user out of the immersive experience that is one of the virtual world’s main draws. But Linden Lab is now adjusting its technology to make it easier to bring data into its virtual world from the larger Web and from users’ desktops.
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Published by June 21st, 2008
in Second Life and virtual worlds.
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If Dubai is the City of the Future, its digital twin in the virtual world of Second Life is the “City of the Speechless”. Here, amid millions of people chatting across oceans via Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP), there is silence from the pixilated UAE residents due to Etisalat’s ban of some online voice transmissions. Even so, a class from the Dubai Women’s College (DWC) is making a noise in the simulated world. Last term, the college opened a virtual campus in Second Life. Already populated by more than 13 million computer-generated avatars – virtual representations of users that inhabit Second Life – the roughly 40 DWC pupils are among the digital domain’s citizens.
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Published by June 7th, 2008
in Second Life, virtual worlds and collaboration.
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To save money in these tough times, universities, conference planners and global companies have started holding gatherings for far-flung employees and students in the online world known as Second Life. Sun Microsystems, a Silicon Valley tech company, has only one rule: Employees should show up looking like humans. Other companies don’t seem to mind if their workers take the form of animals and other entities while they’re on the clock.
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Published by May 26th, 2008
in Second Life and virtual worlds.
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Edd Hifeng barely merits a second glance in “Second Life.” A steel-gray robot with lanky limbs and linebacker shoulders, he looks like a typical avatar in the popular virtual world. But Edd is different. His actions are animated not by a person at a keyboard but by a computer. Edd is a creation of artificial intelligence, or AI, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who endowed him with a limited ability to converse and reason. It turns out “Second Life” is more than a place where pixelated avatars chat, interact and fly about. It’s also a frontier in AI research because it’s a controllable environment where testing intelligent creations is easier.
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Published by May 26th, 2008
in libraries and Second Life.
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Not the whole of congress, but one person in particular - Republican congressman Mark Kirk. This is the same man who is targeting social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, but not content with going after them, he has now tried to drum up support for his cause by bringing Second Life in to the argument. Kirk is a Republican congressman seeking re-election next year. He is the man behind a bill known as the Deleting Online Predators Act. This bill basically takes the stance that all social networking sites are havens for pedophiles and children need protecting from the danger at all costs.
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Published by April 6th, 2008
in libraries, Second Life and virtual worlds.
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Second Life is more than an on-line game for ETH Zurich. It is a handy three-dimensional tool used for resolving real issues. ETH Zurich Computer Science students recently used it to analyze and solve the everyday frustrations involved in borrowing a book from a library. The project to tackle the problems that lending libraries face was carried out within the framework of the Information Systems Laboratory course taught by Professor Nesime Tatbul at the Computer Science Department (D-INFK), The study of information systems is a core area of computer science. It has evolved from the more established study of database management. Research into information systems now includes pervasive computing: the convergence of largely wireless technologies and the Internet. This may well signal a shift away from personal computing and into pools of shared information, available to anyone from anywhere at any time.
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Published by March 23rd, 2008
in Second Life.
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Rosedale, who announced that he’s stepping aside as CEO of Linden Lab, describes the challenges of continuing Second Life growth while preserving the crazy culture that made it popular.
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“Second Life,” the online world that brings players together from across the globe to socialize, shop and even fly, is developing a second career as a hot spot for learning English as a second language (ESL).It’s a classic innovation–a novel way to use a tool created for an entirely different purpose, namely to have a good time. That’s still the reason why most players come to “Second Life,” but English-language instructors who spend time with students there say they’re combining fun and learning–and getting excellent results.
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Published by March 16th, 2008
in education and Second Life.
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It’s all been a bit quiet on Second Life news recently (you know how much we love Facebook these days). The rush of companies and organisations setting up shop in the virtual world may have died down, but Sussex University has decided to build a presence there. The “island” looks like the real campus, and visitors can go to the library, attend online seminars, or visit the Students’ Union. Possible uses for the virtual campus include the provision of online resources, lectures and seminars, holding virtual open days, broadcasting university news, and showcasing student work.
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Published by March 3rd, 2008
in Second Life, collections and mapping.
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A new installation inside Second Life is bringing alive one of the world’s largest collections of antique maps. Called the David Rumsey Maps Island (registration required), the Second Life site is San Francisco map collector David Rumsey’s latest high-technology plan to share his collection with as large an audience as possible.
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Published by February 18th, 2008
in Second Life and iPhone.
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You wouldn’t think such a computing-intensive game would run on such a small device. Well, it does, barely, on the iPhone. The truth is that this particular version is just being streamed from Second Life’s servers, through Safari. Here is an excerpt from Tech Digest’s article:“In a layman’s nutshell, all the processing is being done NOT on the iPhone, on a central server. All that’s being streamed to the iPhone is the visuals - essentially, a video feed of the Second Life environment. Then, when you tap the on-screen buttons to move, or type in a message, that’s sent back up to the server for processing.”
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Published by February 18th, 2008
in education, Second Life and virtual worlds.
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Imagine a science class without text books. It sounds tough to do, but it is happening at one school in our area. It’s part of an innovative pilot program that allows students to experience lessons like never before. Education reporter Art McFarland has the story. It is an experience that is out of this world, but inside any computer.“You can do things you can’t do in real life, like fly,” student Ernesto Machado said. “You can actually go into the volcano.” It is called “Second Life” for a reason. It allows computer users to live outside of themselves, even inside an erupting volcano. At Brooklyn’s High School for Global Citizenship, Second Life is part of a science class.
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Published by February 5th, 2008
in education, Second Life and virtual worlds.
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The Princeton Review has partnered with Ohio University to launch a free SAT prep course inside of Second Life. It seems like it’s an experimental endeavor aimed at testing demand, but also at generating more demand for the physical prep classes. Only two 20-minute presentations are available (one took place on January 19th and the second will be on Jan. 31), but users will then be involved in a Q&A with instructors. Ohio University, which entered Second Life a year ago, also hopes to generate virtual foot traffic across its campus. “We wanted something fun that would really appeal to tech-savvy, college-bound juniors and seniors,” said Michael Reiss, online marketing manager for Princeton Review.
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Published by January 26th, 2008
in Second Life and virtual worlds.
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Governments have been taking tentative steps towards establishing a presence in the virtual world. And while the business case may yet to be proven, there is potential for the public sector to utilize virtual applications such as Second Life, says analyst Alison Brooks. Brooks, senior analyst for government insights at Toronto-based IDC Canada, says that there’s some piloting of Second Life going on across the world with the U.S. government using it for immigration and educational forums. “The Center for Disease Control uses it as an educational tool,” she says.
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Published by January 12th, 2008
in education and Second Life.
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The debate continues over just how useful virtual worlds like Second Life are for educational purposes. We spoke with Drexel University’s Jean-Claude Bradley, who is e-learning coordinator for the College of Arts and Sciences, and an associate professor of chemistry. Despite his initial skepticism, in 2007 Bradley helped establish Drexel’s presence in Second Life, Drexel Island, and used Second Life last semester to augment portions of his Introduction to Organic Chemistry course. He has blogged extensively about his use of the medium. Here, he discusses the benefits–and drawbacks–of the much-discussed virtual world.
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Linden Lab released the key economic metrics for Second Life for the months of October and November. While the company has stopped distributing the unique population numbers “due to data quality concerns” “regarding retroactive cancellation of accounts and the algorithm used for determining uniqueness,” some believe it is simply a way to hide a downward trend in the virtual world. That seems unlikely since the included data shows the same decline in usage. For only the second time in the history of the virtual world, the usage by hours declined, from 25,786,109.0841 hours to 24,484,938.9657 hours. The active avatar count also dropped from 559,820 to 543,375.
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Published by December 22nd, 2007
in Second Life and virtual worlds.
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Second Life has long been seen as the bell-whether for the growing interest in virtual spaces. Here, founder Philip Rosedale talks to the BBC News website about the past and future of the parallel world he is helping to create. These are interesting times for Second Life. In the four short years it has existed, it has seen media coverage go from hysterical to hectoring. It has been hailed as both a harbinger of the next big thing and a brake on the burgeoning development of virtual worlds.
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Published by December 9th, 2007
in Second Life.
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As if we don’t have enough worries in the real world, now we have to worry about virtual world pickpockets. The Mercury News has learned that security researchers have found a flaw in Second Life virtual world that allows them to strip a user’s character of all of its in-world money. Charles Miller (right) and Dino Dai Zovi , two experienced hackers, say they have found a vulnerability in the way Second Life protects a user’s money inside the virtual world from being stolen. It has significance because that currency, dubbed Linden dollars, can be converted into real world dollars. But the risks for Linden Lab, the San Francisco operator of Second Life, are limited because the researchers say the flaw can be quickly patched.
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Published by November 20th, 2007
in education, Second Life and virtual worlds.
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Bowling Green State University is celebrating its newest campus, where faculty offices are on a mountainside, people from across the world routinely drop by, and students can fly to class. Obviously, this is not in northwest Ohio. It’s in Second Life, a virtual reality community becoming increasingly popular among educational institutions.
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Published by November 12th, 2007
in Second Life.
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Until recently, the business news media fawned over the Second Life online virtual world. Stories fixated on Second Life “residents” who got rich brokering virtual real estate, or on the numerous corporations and consumer brands rushing to claim their presence within it (by building virtual kiosk centers or “islands”). Virtual world hype trumps open source hype, so little virtual ink has gone into discussing the open source initiative that Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world, established to further its development. One of these projects is the Linux version of the Second Life client, the viewer application that runs on the resident’s computer and lets the resident interact with the graphical environments of the virtual world. Ever since its release, the Linux client has remained in constant development by an informal team, usually three people. Their work could directly benefit the open source and Linux community beyond Second Life, in the aftermath of the hype.
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Published by November 3rd, 2007
in Second Life, virtual worlds and news.
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As news organizations slash budgets and scale back bureaus, CNN is expanding—except not in real life. In the week of Nov. 5, the news giant is set to open a news-gathering outpost in Second Life. And unlike news service Reuters, which embedded a real reporter in the online virtual world last year, CNN will rely on Second Life “residents” to do all the legwork.
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Published by November 3rd, 2007
in Second Life and virtual worlds.
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A UK government minister made a virtual pledge to police virtual worlds this week, as the problems of the real world are increasingly reflected in the likes of Second Life. Lord Triesman, talking at the Virtual Worlds Forum in London, flagged up a number of “causes for concern” that would need government input to control. The list was a familiar one, featuring child pornography, ID fraud, money laundering, and copyright infringement.
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Published by November 3rd, 2007
in Second Life and virtual worlds.
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The Virtual Worlds Forum in London this week brought together a bunch of business people, technologists, entrepreneurs and marketers to network and exchange ideas around virtual worlds. I had wondered if there was enough activity in the UK for a conference like this to make sense in the UK, but more than 400 people showed up and it felt to me as though it caught the wave just about right.
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If you could choose a new physique at the click of a button, what would you change? Would you be thinner? Taller? Have broader shoulders? Use a wheelchair? Possibly that last option is not top of your personal wish-list. But for young entrepreneur Simon Stevens, a wheelchair is an absolute must - even in a virtual environment like Second Life. Entrepreneur Simon Stevens’ avatar is tanned, slim, has dark hair, runs a successful online nightclub called Wheelies, and moves around Second Life’s virtual world in a wheelchair. To understand why, it helps to understand a bit more about what kind of man Stevens is.
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Published by October 7th, 2007
in Second Life, virtual worlds and economics.
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In August 2007, the digital world experienced a first: a genuine run on a bank located on the “virtual world” Second Life. As depositors rushed to withdraw their funds from the shadowy Ginko Financial, their predicament drew much attention. But far from identifying it as a calamity, to many commentators it confirmed the faithfulness of the computer simulation: after all, the real world had long experienced insolvencies, too.
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Published by October 7th, 2007
in Second Life and virtual worlds.
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A few years ago, it was considered an article of faith that massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds, at least American ones, couldn’t get to the million subscriber mark. Then along came “World of Warcraft,” which quickly disabused the world of that notion. Now, “Second Life” has joined the seven-figure club. Recently, the so-called metaverse, which launched in 2003, passed the million registered accounts mark.
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Published by September 29th, 2007
in Second Life and virtual worlds.
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Orderly, pornography-free and safe for children, “meet-me,” an online interactive virtual Tokyo, is Japan’s answer to “Second Life.” Or so its creators hope. Kunimasa Hamaoka, who oversees “meet-me” at digital marketing company Transcosmos Inc., is banking on the cultural differences between Japanese and Americans to compete against the world’s top virtual community.
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Published by September 22nd, 2007
in Second Life, virtual worlds, Library of Congress and preservation.
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The Library of Congress has awarded a $590,000 grant to Rochester Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University, University of Maryland and Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, to explore the issue of digital preservation of video games and virtual worlds. The Preserving Creative America Initiative will fund the Preserving Virtual Worlds project, administered by the Library of Congress under the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIPP).
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Published by September 22nd, 2007
in Second Life, American Library Association, virtual worlds, Facebook, MySpace and censorship.
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The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) is pleased to announce Banned Books Week activities for librarians and the general public in virtual worlds Second Life, Teen Second Life and on social networking sites MySpace and Facebook. ALA is working with other library partners to provide an interactive experience centered on Banned Books Week, September 29-October 6, 2007, to help librarians and others to feel comfortable in social networking spaces and to reach out to new audiences. Partners include Alliance Library System, Alliance Second Life Library, TAP Information Services and the new ALA membership group Virtual Communities and Libraries.
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Published by September 22nd, 2007
in Second Life and virtual worlds.
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When Intel looks to the next few years of computing, the dollar signs look a lot better in three dimensions, full motion, and high definition. The rise of what Intel calls the 3-D Web will transform the way people use the Internet with a far richer experience, exemplified today by Second Life but turning more realistic and being deployed in medicine and business, CTO Justin Rattner said in a last-day keynote address at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. The best news for the chip giant, however, is how much computing power all this will take.
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Published by September 15th, 2007
in web 2.0, Second Life and virtual worlds.
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Don’t get too attached to MySpace. You might want to pull up stakes from Second Life, too. And you’ll probably want to stop posting inanities to Twitter. Why? All of these sites will be gone before the end of this decade. These social networks are—or were—media darlings, and all are part of a new wave of Internet hyperbole. Though millions of dollars may not have been invested and lost on these enterprises, untold hours of airtime, pages of text, and human effort have been and continue to be wasted on each of them. Each site approaches the social-networking paradigm differently, yet they all share a common thread: overreaching ambition and impossible expectations. They live, to an extent, inside the second Internet bubble.
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Published by September 15th, 2007
in Second Life and virtual worlds.
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In recent months, there’s been a lot of reporting on Second Life (SL), the three-dimensional immersive online environment where users choose a name and appearance for their character, who then walks around and talks to the others and builds digital objects and lives on islands and goes to nightclubs. Literature is popping up there, too - not just in retail-enabled bookstores, but, as the author of this article discovered, in the writing of actual users.
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